Details

This is the first attempt to port the current voice scripts to perl. The benefits are/should be numerous:
- Should give a huge speedup on Cygwin
- Also gives a nice speedup in Linux & relatives.
- Should allow better use of SAPI (it might be possible to keep a single connection open)
- Perl, as horrible as it is, is probably more hacker-friendly than shell for large jobs, and should hopefully allow more people to help out.
- The configure script looks slightly nicer. And voice building is better integrated.
- voice.pl is a single file and can be run directly from the commandline. In theory all that's needed is voicefont, genlang, english.lang and the appropriate language-file.

There are still some caveats though:
- The reason for this re-implementation was to allow TTS tweaks (phonetical replacements) - I have not added this yet.
- The script should eventually allow .talk clip generation as well. This is not yet implemented.

Given how much brouhaha the last voice change generated, I wonder if this should get a mention on either of the mailing lists? Thoughts?

I also forgot, probably most importantly:
- SAPI5 building isn't implemented yet. This should definitely be done before even considering committing this. If someone with a clue about Windows/SAPI5 could do this, I'd very much appreciate it.

Updated patch that adds the following:
- Responds to V=1 being set (call "V=1 make voice" to see details during build)
- Shows a bit of information about what's being built
- Shows progress indicator
- An attempt at SAPI5 building (still just calls the .vbs over and over - someone could probably improve this)

Update:
- Add sapi5_voice_new.vbs - accepts alternating lines of string and filename on stdin and voices the string into filenames. Exits when filename is blank.
- Use this script for SAPI5 building - this greatly speeds up voicefile generation in Cygwin (launching LAME many times still takes time, but there's probably not much that can be done about that).

Update:
- Add possibility to do regexp search&replace on strings
- Special handling of VOICE_PAUSE (this file is added to the tools/ dir
- Add wavtrim step
- Fix tools/Makefile to remove voicefont and wavtrim when running make clean (not related, to be honest)
- Save the voicefile to a different filename instead of overwriting an existing voicefile of the same name

I created a section on the VoiceBuilding wikipage for keeping track of this patch.

This should be my final version. Changes in this version:
- Building of multiple voices disabled (it wasn't implemented properly, so I'll have a go at it after this has been committed)
- The voice script now cleans up after itself if interrupted
- Changing of default options for festival based on which language is selected, the same could easily be done for other engines.